Old filmstrip: "Bicycle Safety"

Once again, Derrick Bostrom of Bostworld provided an invaluable service to the world by scanning a vintage educational filmstrip and uploading it to YouTube. (Here's the previous filmstrip he converted).

Cathedral Filmstrips’ “Bicycle Safety” is kind of like a “Mechanized Death” for the Saturday morning cartoons crowd. Not gory by any means, but definitely designed for extreme impact – in a Saturday morning cartoons kind of way. The art itself is entirely in the style of the classic matinee short. The harassed citizens pop their eyes and flap their tongues comically. The foolish children show their agony with stars, corkscrews and tweety birds. But the underlying message remains grim: those deviating from cycling best practices face grievous injury, possible death and certain ridicule.

there is a voice there – the vaguely male child’s voice – that is incredibly familiar to me from records I had as a young kid. Anyone have ideas as to how to find out who the voice talent was on these?

Speaking of bicycle safety, check out this extremely unsafe bike accessory from the late 1960s. The kids in the commercial aren’t wearing helmets…or even shoes! Today, the lawyers would be all over this: